Lookin good Mr. Washington, nice glasses!

Contrived and oh so hard to believe.  That is a good summation of The Book of Eli.  Written by Gary Whitta and directed by the Hughes brothers, this was a generally bad piece of cinema.  I tried to like this movie, especially as post-apocalyptic pseudo science fiction, not much good exists of this kind.

This movie stars Denzel Washington as the hero, who can fight amazingly well.  A word on the fight scenes, pointless.  Absolutely inconsequential to the story.  Hey look, he’s a bad ass, we get it.  But when the film makers push the story into a fight scene just to have a cool few minutes of action, the rest of the story suffers.  Mainly because it takes the plot no where.

The heroine?  Actress Mila Kunis provides a bad performance, she didn’t have much to work with anyway.  With the underlying theme of the movie being religion, it becomes obvious that the  writer and directors have little experience with it.  Set designs were poor and as Luke put it, are quite obvious back lots for whatever studio they were shooting at.  How many profile shots depicting the massive ‘burnt’ sky can we stand?  Or long shots showing the desolate world and the craters from what we can assume were nuclear blasts?  Yes, we know there’s nothing left, please stop showing us over and over and over and over.  There was nothing left of that horse by the time the credits rolled.

There were some fantastic ideas in this 2 hour feature, but just because an idea is great, doesn’t mean it will come out that way.  There was very little depth and what depth there was I had to extract through a painstaking process of ignoring everything else.  As sci-fi it failed badly, even Avatar succeeded in numerous ways purely on the SF basis, despite whatever failings it had.  The Book of Eli did not depict a post-armageddon society, it did not explore reasons behind the portrayed future, forget any purpose for the characters making the decisions they did.  There wasn’t even any critical analysis of any aspect of our world!

Oh, talk about ridiculous plot twist!  Not only was this sprung on the audience without any sort of foreshadowing, whatever cards were played to give hints, were so incredibly irrelevant and over done in other movies, that they truly meant nothing.  The fate of ‘the book’ (the whole “reason” for this show) was done in such a way as to make earlier and seemingly important events meaningless in retrospect.  There were far better ways to resolve this ‘conflict’.

I have to say something good right?  Well, I liked the pointless fight scenes, Denzel was a big bad A in the beginning.  Um, Oh!  Mila Kunis had some great wardrobe going on, I’d certainly like to get some of those outfits for my wife.  Not something you should say about humanity that scavenges for every little bit of anything, right?  Also, we are led to believe guns and ammo (along with everything else) are very rare and scarce, yet the last action scene is a battle royale with all sorts of weapons.

I’m sick of talking about it, I could say more, and I could even dredge up more good things to say, but I don’t want to.